It's still expensive and risky.

Summary: "The most 27 cats in history", "10 you have never heard of the beauty", "The girl woke up in the morning, the most regret 10 mistakes" if you do not control your curiosity, through a friend's referral link into BuzzFeed read these content, it is possible

"The most beautiful 27 cats in history", "10 you have never heard of beauty", "Girls wake up in the morning the most regret the 10 mistakes" ... If you're not controlling your curiosity, and you've seen it through a friend's referral link, it's likely that you've contributed a lot to its advertising revenue.

The American social news website BuzzFeed is a typical representative of the so-called "sponsored content" or "native ads" (Native ads). Although the content looks like a normal article, it is sponsored by the appropriate advertisers. Although BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti (Jonah Peretti) has a lot of skills, it's not as simple as it seems to want these ads to spread like a virus.

If you want to find a typical representative for the phenomenon of "original advertisement" or "promotion content", this is BuzzFeed. The company was founded by Jonah Peretti, a former editor of the Huffington Post. Unlike some of the other content companies that try to experience new forms of advertising, BuzzFeed the fate of his own content, refusing to load traditional banner ads. But according to New York magazine's recent interview with Peretti and BuzzFeed, it is clear that reinventing advertising is not a stroll in the park, BuzzFeed may have a difficult start, and there is still a long task to achieve.

As the New York magazine emphasizes, word of mouth is the holy grail of advertisers: consumers talk about advertisers ' products (or things related to products), but they don't have to pay for what advertisers are passionate about. "This is just like manna from heaven, but no one knows how to use it for purpose," says David Ogilvy, a Hendawey Ol advertising tycoon. "All in all, Peretti has been trying this since 2001. At the time, he had shelled Nike, pointing to Nike's overseas manufacturing plants.

This is the same reason advertisers are currently interested in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter: they want to work out how to create "social" advertising messages and deliver them to users in ways that are not advertised, encouraging users to share ads. The only problem is that no one really knows how to do this.

How does viral communication work? No one Knows

Anyone can identify viral marketing activities afterwards, but no one knows how to create a viral marketing campaign in a scientific way. The Microsoft Researcher, Peretti's best friend, Duncan Wotz (Duncan Watts) has made a unique contribution to the field, and he and Peretti have an algorithm to describe the process. But Watts admits that the chaos and difficulty of viral marketing are hard to predict and that these algorithms are far from enough.

"It's like billiard balls colliding with each other, which is the most complicated thing in our minds," Watts said. "But Watts's research suggests that the usual understanding of Gladwellian-style viral marketing does not really reflect the way viral marketing is spread."

Evan Peretti Evan Peretti, a viral marketing expert, admits that the difficulty of calculating viral marketing influence is more difficult than most people think. The New York magazine points out that the BuzzFeed founder was obviously a little annoyed when it came to the advertising industry criticizing BuzzFeed's promotional content as less valuable. An advertising industry executive says "a bunch of cats" is not going to help the reader in real marketing campaigns. Peretti responded by saying, "Can you provide a list of cute animals with 5 million traffic? This is quite difficult. ”

Some advertisers resist the idea

So that BuzzFeed's attempt to reshape the advertising industry will face a lot of difficulties, and faces a revolt from the advertising industry itself: Peretti talks about how promotional content can bring creativity and storytelling to the advertising industry, but many advertisers do not think that combining their advertising brands with a picture of a dog can help sell products. Peretti thinks people with such ideas are short-sighted, but this still faces obstacles.

Another hurdle is related to this: the fact that some of the BuzzFeed's promotional content stands in the opposite of viral advertising. According to New York magazine, Virgin American Airlines and other brands have spent some time linking their brands to BuzzFeed, but they have not had a noticeable effect. A post that has only been shared 350 times on Facebook is tantamount to failure.

New York magazine said, "Other promotional activities have been generally effective." The Government Employees Insurance Company (Geico) has a flow of 140,000 times, a general electric flow of 65,000 times and a Pepsi-Cola flow of 44,000 times. These figures are not comparable to the hype of the original ads, which is why advertising agencies are less likely to catch such ads. ”

It's still expensive and risky.

The third obstacle to BuzzFeed ambition is the cost of content that manufacturing sites want to attract advertisers to promote. New York Magazine points out that more than 10 editors in the BuzzFeed work on posts and then decide which posts to invest heavily. This is a very expensive process.

The final hurdle is that blogger Andrew Shaliven Andrew Sullivan has pointed out in a series of articles that the evil of promoting content is very similar to BuzzFeed's approach: that if BuzzFeed blurs the boundaries between editing and advertising, the reader's trust will not be won.

BuzzFeed has raised 20 million dollars through the latest round of funding. New York Magazine estimates that the site's advertising revenue this year will reach $40 million trillion. But based on the creativity of people to build a profitable business in an unpredictable field like web content, it's no easy job. Ask the traditional media industry to know why.

Mode is not highly replicable

Although BuzzFeed's approach may be a meaningful and sustainable business model for themselves. But other companies are facing a lot of problems trying to imitate. Customer-oriented advertising design is a labor-intensive product, to achieve the effect of scale, if not tens of millions of of the investment, some start-up companies are difficult to do.

For traditional media, they often have to adhere to the ancient news standards, if they learn this set, often self-defeating. For example, before the Atlantic Monthly encounter, because the advertising nature of the promotional articles and serious news content together, causing controversy, eventually led to the Atlantic Monthly have to apologize.

But for the company's founder, Peretti, he left the Huffington Post because the traditional news was the last place to change the media system. So Peretti decided to use the idea of "viral marketing" in the new company he founded. He wanted to master the laws of information dissemination and use it to create the influence of new media.

Like BuzzFeed, which are not popular, "viruses" can grow and spread, or die when they first appear. BuzzFeed is still an ongoing "gamble".